That makes sense indeed sir!
It might be more sinister than just finding the OS drive then - could be that as it did not successfully boot and required a restart (not your fault at all by any means here) that some of how Vista starts got screwed up. If you see the Dell logo followed by the Vista or any Microsoft screen its looking at the correct drive, just not the files to start correctly.
I would hope you could boot from CD/DvD (should be an option in the bios) or worst case from an external Drive and 'repair' (sorry, not used Vista much at all myself) just the very start of the filesystem. If you have a local guy of a PC savvy mate, they might be able to boot your Vista from an original disk and get you back and running fairly quick
This shouldn't be a disaster but its strange it would happen on a new machine!
HTH
Dave
It might be more sinister than just finding the OS drive then - could be that as it did not successfully boot and required a restart (not your fault at all by any means here) that some of how Vista starts got screwed up. If you see the Dell logo followed by the Vista or any Microsoft screen its looking at the correct drive, just not the files to start correctly.
I would hope you could boot from CD/DvD (should be an option in the bios) or worst case from an external Drive and 'repair' (sorry, not used Vista much at all myself) just the very start of the filesystem. If you have a local guy of a PC savvy mate, they might be able to boot your Vista from an original disk and get you back and running fairly quick
This shouldn't be a disaster but its strange it would happen on a new machine!
HTH
Dave